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by badfrog 2236 days ago
> Facebook rendered just fine a decade ago. What changed between now and then

It does way more things. In particular, there are a lot more interactive experiences. A decade ago, it just loaded a web page and nothing changed until you refreshed. Now live videos and other content types have streams of comments and reactions pushed to the client in real time.

3 comments

I really don't want a video to autoplay on the side of the screen when I'm reading some news article, for example.

It was so much better before when there just were less ways of doing what the website wanted and more ways of doing what you wanted with your browser and your computing power.

Sure, it's totally reasonable for somebody to dislike these features. I just object to the claims that it doesn't do anything substantially different than what it did 10 years ago.
> Now live videos and other content types have streams of comments and reactions pushed to the client in real time.

Many of these are anti-features I’d love to be able to turn off.

None of that stuff has improved anyone's life worth a damn.
What? For example, "X is typing..." message in messenger is great for pacing the conversation. It makes online conversation closer to offline conversation. Not all "dynamic HTML" stuffs are good, but some are indeed a big plus.